Zionism is a madness …

A pathology is a pathology no matter how it is expressed. In some cases it is a temperature and in other cases people put on uniforms and start marching around with guns. But in the end a pathology is a pathology.

Israel refers to itself as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. It claims photographs like that below show a concern with ‘security’. No one is really fooled. As just said, a pathology is apathology and we all know something is wrong when people hide behind guns and tanks. After all we saw enough of it through the last century.

Look at this photograph. We see no communication, we see no interaction and we certainly see no respect. We see a little man in a uniform pushing the Palestinian around. We see the gun and radio. Were we actually there we would no doubt hear strange commands in a confusion of Hebrew and American swear words. Maybe we would hear a little Arabic: yella, yella. What the photograph shows is Israeli politics. The politics of fear or a straight forward pathology. This is zionism. It is about fear and pushing others around because there is no room for any other feeling but fear. Fear is of the past, fear of the present and quite definitely fear of the future. And it all gets mixed up so that no one knows who is angry with whom. Narratives move outside time and space. Fear distorts all sense of having a grip. The outcome is collective and persistent crime … injustice.

Maybe for zionism it is all about the uniforms. Covering something up. Concealment of a purpose no one understands anymore. Confusion about a past that has never really been dealt with. Perpetrators of a horrible episode in European history that has never been properly worked through. The pains of the past have not been acknowledged. So the pathology just goes on. It is displaced in all directions as the photograph shows.

This is Israel’s politics. There is no place for the Palestinians. Palestinians are objects to be pushed around, here and there because zionism is like a blindness. It does not see itself because it does not see Others. But in this photograph no one is misunderstanding what is going on. Palestinians of course are not confused. They are hopeless at politics but they are sure about zionism. For Palestinians land theft is land theft and nutters who put up check-points and walls everywhere to separate one Palestinian from the next do not make arguments. They just try to push everyone around in a constant cycle of crazy-making. Zionism is pathology.